Word: one
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...paper from their pockets with an infantile-Byronic air, to the delight of their mothers and to the horror of all reasonable people; others stave off the evil hour until they fall in love, when, inspired, I suppose, by the object of their sonnets, they often astonish every one but themselves by the excellence of their verses, just as madmen have been known to develop powers of which their hours of sanity showed no trace; others, again, are attacked by the passion for versification at an advanced, perhaps a senile age, when they make themselves happy and their friends miserable...
...first fact about college poetry which strikes one is that there is a great deal too much of it. The maxim "Write nothing in verse that can be written in prose" is entirely disregarded, or rather inverted. The would-be poet, thinking that passable poetry is to be preferred to good prose, expends his energies in putting his thoughts into verse, with more or less regard for metre, forgetting that really good prose is seldom written, and that poetry of a certain stamp is always forthcoming, be the occasion a golden wedding in the country, a military dinner in town...
...good or bad fortune of the present age to be one of intellectual tumult and revolution. The Christian world, like a man just awakening to the knowledge of his own faculties, has begun to question the truth of what it has been taught to accept as dogma. On the one hand, science, made confident by its recent achievements, assails the very foundations of the Christian religion, rejecting with scorn testimony and proof which require standards of judgment other than those of the exact sciences; while, on the other, literature, or rather the champion of the "literary theory of culture," refuses...
...have become possessed with the desire for thorough intellectual training. For a man to be learned and accomplished is nothing new in theory or in practice; but the separation of learning and intellectual training from religion, - using the word in its broadest sense, - or rather the elevation of the one above the other, is something as new as it is startling...
...this new movement principally affects by its two phases the two extremes of society. Certain of the most learned and brilliant writers of the day develop and expound their theory of culture in its aesthetic direction, and as opposed to or as including religion; while, according to more than one authority, the lower classes have begun to discuss at least one side of the question, - that which concerns religion as it is now taught. Scepticism and contempt for the "theologians" have, we are told, long prevailed among them, until, in the natural course of events, they have begun...